Free A Conspiracy of Kings by Megan Whalen Turner Page B

he was finished, my knees no longer held me. I
don’t know who untied me, but they carried me back to my
pallet and left me there while they went off to work.
    At the midday break I could get myself to my feet. No one got
between me and the first place in line. I had to eat on my knees,
the bowl on the ground. Then I lay down again, praying that Ochto
wouldn’t expect me to work in the fields after the break.
    He didn’t, and I slept on and off through the end of the
day. It was interesting. My back was certainly sore, more damage
done there than Basrus had done when he was disguising me as an
unruly slave, but it was damage to the skin, nothing much deeper.
The pain, no matter how sharp, was not as distressing as the
aftermath of Basrus’s beating, perhaps because it
wasn’t my head that hurt, or because I was not so shattered
by other events as I had been then.
    I felt no particular distress, but a little surprise.
    When we were adventuring after Hamiathes’s Gift, I had
watched the magus beat Eugenides. We’d thought he was no more
than a common thief from Sounis’s gutters, and had listened
to him whine and complain for days. When food was missing, it was
easy to blame him. The magus used a riding crop on his back, and
holy sacrificial lambs, Gen had come up off the ground like
he’d been catapulted. It was as if he was a different person,
some stranger who’d manifested in Gen’s body.
He’d dumped Pol flat onto his back—something I never
thought I’d see—and gone for the magus. If Pol
hadn’t been up again so quickly, the magus was ready to run
and dignity be damned. Even with Pol between him and Gen, the magus
had been wary.
    I thought later that this was the real Gen revealed, the person
who’d been hiding behind a screen of complaints and needling
humor. But I spent whole days with Eugenides after our adventures,
and that Eugenides was exactly the Gen I had traveled with. Maybe I
don’t know which Gen is real. But I know there was nothing
feigned about his emotions after he had been beaten.
    Where, I wondered, was my wounded pride?
Where was my outrage? My self-respect? Nowhere, it seemed. My back
hurt. I lay there on my pallet, hoping it would improve soon and
wondering, in a distant, unreproachful sort of way, if I was any
kind of man at all, and decided that I probably wasn’t.
     
    I got up the next day. Very sore but well able to move a shovel.
Though reduced to half a shovel again at a try, I was no more
pathetic than I had been when I first arrived in Hanaktos’s
fields, and Ochto didn’t seem inclined to push me. I worked
alone. Dirnes wasn’t speaking to me. He cast me bitter looks
in the barracks and turned a disdainful shoulder on me if he caught
me looking in his direction.
    There was nothing I could do about it, so I worked. Ochto was
watching me carefully, and I didn’t want to give him the idea
that I might be contemplating anything in line with my man-killer
reputation. The sweat in my stripes stung, and I was looking
forward to rinsing it away with fresh well water once we were back
at the barracks. I certainly didn’t want to find myself
chained again to the ring in the wall by my pallet.
    Alas, when we reached the barracks, I discovered an
unanticipated difficulty. Ochto had pulled my shirt off before
using the cane on my back. In the morning, moving very carefully,
I’d managed to get it on. Now I didn’t think I could
get it off. Not only was it much too painful to lift my arms over
my head, but the stupid thing had gotten stuck to me in places. I
was at a standstill, staring wistfully at the well, and noticed
that several of the other men were looking daggers at Dirnes.
    Reluctantly, he came to help, but he was still angry, and his
ministrations were not gentle. He pulled on my shirt, and I swore
at him. He was more careful then, but his scowl was no less black.
I cared little for that once he was tipping the bucket at my neck.
It felt divine. He patted me dry with my